Scared to death

Scared to death? Nicely paradoxical—to think of all the reasons people deliberately scare themselves in order to feel more alive. Or perhaps that’s what the phrase means; to have one’s aliveness stimulated and intensified to the point where one dies. As if a surfeit of life is the same thing as death.

Boojum

Finally, it has been established. What is a Snark? What is a Boojum?

It’s obvious what the Snark is. The Snark is a monster. Now, monster is an interesting word. It derives from the Latin, monstrum, which means (I pluck Lewis and Short from my shelf) ‘a divine omen, indicating misfortune, an evil omen, portent’. This word is in turn from moneo: ‘to teach, instruct, tell, inform, point out; to announce, predict, foretell’. Originally a calf (say) born with two heads would be a monster in the sense of being ominous: through it the gods would be trying to tell us something. Though the word now has the connotation of a large and terrifying fantastical beast, the earlier meaning still haunts it. Godzilla, say, is a monster in the contemporary vulgar sense, but also in the sense that he is trying to tell us something (in his case, something about the evils of nuclear testing). What Carroll’s monster teaches us concerns the process of enquiry itself: what it means is meaning itself ... unless, of course, it is a boojum in which case the monster means the devouring of meaning. What devours? What is it that chews endlessly, endlessly? A boojum is a cow (jum short for jumentum, the Latin for draught-cattle; and bo, from bos, ‘ox, bull, cow’). Imagine how disappointed you’d be if you went to all that trouble to find a Snark only for it to turn out to be—a cow. Do you think you’d be disappointed enough to softly and suddenly vanish away?

A calf with two heads indeed.

Doubt

Dubium sapientiae initium, says Descartes: 'Doubt is the origin of wisdom' [Meditationes de prima philosophiae, 1641]. The implication seems clear enough; the business of the person in search of wisdom (the wisdom-lover, the sopho-phile) is to start in doubt and move beyond it. But doubt should be doubt enough to doubt this conclusion; that there could ever be a wisdom entirely purged of doubt. Descartes knew this, of course; and this apothegm deserves to be remembered, like the cogito ergo sum, as a deliberate hall-of-mirrors paradox.

Life

This long journey from tropics to the poles, from the warmth of the cot to the unremitting chill of the grave ...

Epic

The rage of Achilles; Aeneas, hardening his heart to abandon Dido and surrendering to anger to kill Turnus; the wrath of God. Epic, as a mode, has been absolutely marked and determined by this emotion. Epic is an angry literature.

Path poem

The path is sheer
To far, from near:
Its name is fear.

Insubstantiality and substantiality

All that is solid melts into air, yes, of course. But it is also true that all that is air congeals into solidity. It's all a matter of timescales; and there's no obvious reason to prioritise one over the other.